Marin painting contractor launches software startup

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John Busick checks out his business management software, WorkGlue, last week in San Rafael. “We came up with the name ‘Workglue’ because it’s the glue that holds the company together,” he said. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

John Busick, a painting contractor based in San Rafael, launched a software company that helps other contractors run their businesses. (Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

John Busick was on his laptop at a painting contractors’ conference in Chicago about three years ago when a fellow attendee circled around toward him.

“What is that?” he said, pointing to the screen.

“That’s what I use to manage my company,” replied Busick, whose family business, Bob Kunst Painting Inc., is based in San Rafael. When Busick showed him how it worked, the other man insisted he present it to the 150 contractors in the room.

“I just went up and told them what I did,” Busick recalled. “By the time I was done, 20 minutes later, half the room had their hands in the air, saying, ‘How do I buy this?’”

So was born Workglue.com, a startup all-in-one CRM (customer relations manager) software for small businesses such as painters, landscapers, roofers, home health services or any type of company that sends workers out job-to-job and needs to keep track of it all.

In the past six months or so since the system has been officially for sale, dozens of businesses have signed up for one of the tiered packages ranging from $99 per month for one to three employees to $399 per month for 31 to 50 workers. That gives Busick, who manages Kunst Painting as well as doing marketing and sales for Workglue.com, two full-time jobs.

The same is true for cofounder Robert Stoeber, a former Sausalito resident who now lives in Chandler, Ariz. A web programmer since the 1980s, Stoeber is the tech brains behind Workglue and works full-time doing tech support and helping adapt the program for each customer.

“We’re pretty excited,” Stoeber said. “I don’t know that we’ll be the next Facebook, but I think it has great business potential.”

He said the feedback so far from business owners has been positive.

“If we make one or two more customers happy every day, that’s what we’re looking for,” Stoeber said.

Busick, a fifth-generation painter who graduated from Chico State University with a background in business, said his goal is to provide small businesses with a seamless way to manage and store data on sales, jobs, employees, scheduling, estimating, analytics, documents and Quickbooks bookkeeping — all functions synched into one system, start to finish, for each job.

“You only have to enter the name and address once,” Busick said. “The system pushes it all the way through to the QuickBooks accounting system.”

Busick, with Stoeber’s help, created the prototype for what would later become Workglue about four years ago, after Busick took over the family paint business and realized it was being run with sticky notes and 50 years’ worth of scraps of paper.

After seeing the instant interest at the Chicago conference, Busick realized his family business was not the only one being run like that — and told Stoeber about it.

They realized that there must be hundreds of contractors and companies all over the country in the same tech-challenged boat. It was a go, Busick said.

“We came up with the name ‘Workglue’ because it’s the glue that holds the company together,” Busick said.

John Morris, owner of Phoenix House Painting in Arizona, said that before Workglue, he used to store his painting jobs data up on the wall on two huge dry-erase boards.

“I had my employees’ names on magnets — and I would just move the magnets around from job-to-job,” said Morris, one of the early adopters of Workglue who helped Bursick and Stoeber tweak it during beta testing. “I look back now, that was so Stone Age.”

Now, he said, Workglue has allowed him to grow his business beyond the point that he could have handled before.

“I honestly don’t think I could do what I’m doing right now if I didn’t have Workglue,” Morris said. “It’s like a cellphone — how did I ever manage without it before?”

Morris, who has given all of his supervisors computer tablets with Workglue on them, said he is able to sit anywhere and manage his company through the program. All the jobs are mapped, with each manager color-coded so he can see in an instant where everyone is, how far along the job is, and whether it’s on track to be on time and in budget.

Employees also clock in and clock out — and their hourly rates are simultaneously added to the job cost as it progresses.

“I think what I love about it is that they’re able to make changes as needed,” Morris said.

For example, Morris, who has more than 40 painters plus a half-dozen supervisors and estimators, asked Busick and Stoeber to add a place to put a photo of each employee. That way, when Morris visits a job, he can look on his tablet first to see what the workers look like and know their names before he gets there.

Another change Morris requested was to add night hours to the schedule, since some of his painting jobs require evening work.

“It was a simple thing to add, but it made a huge difference,” he said.

“In the first six months, my sales on the residential side increased 64 percent,” Morris said. “This has made it (the management) so smooth, if you took it away from me, it would cripple my business.”

Stoeber said while Morris needed Workglue if he were going to grow his business further, other customers have different goals.

“One customer wanted to retire and sell his company, but his whole customer list was in a day planner or in a file cabinet with yellowing papers,” Stoeber said.

“He had a 20-year business, but he was not being able to sell it for anything — how much is a day planner worth?” Stoeber said. “Having a system like Workglue, suddenly the business is a lot more valuable.”

Another customer just wanted his weekends back so he could resume playing golf, Stoeber said.

“He was spending all his weekends doing paperwork,” Stoeber said. “I told him I could guarantee he would get his golf time back.”

Busick is optimistic on the future of the company.

Right now, he said, it’s just the two cofounders, and they are not yet ready for official hiring.

But Busick said any programmers, engineers or similar tech geeks who want to join a startup and who don’t want to travel to Silicon Valley are welcome to contact him at the website at Workglue.com.

“I think Workglue could be a $100 million company, with 30 to 40 workers,” he said. “I never planned on being a startup tech entrepreneur, but here I am.”